As Go Twitter Employees, So Go Federal Employees?

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It is now clear that Elon Musk used the template that he employed to purge Twitter to engineer whatever it is the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is doing to the federal bureaucracy. As Kate Conger and Ryan Mac report in The New York Times, he didn’t even bother coming up with a new slogan. Employees at Twitter and the federal government were informed that they had come to a “fork in the road."

Federal employees were given until February 6th to decide whether to resign, currently extended until February 10th and likely to be further extended, given all the legal challenges, some of which we summarized in yesterday’s post. In exchange, such workers were offered full pay and benefits through September 30th, although it seems possible that some employees who choose to leave federal service might be required to stay on for some time to facilitate a transition. So far, The New York Times reports, 65,000 federal workers have taken the offer. Nearly 150,000 federal worker retire voluntarily each year, So far, 3% of the workforce has accepted the offer; Mr. Musk said that the target was 10-15%. 

Other employees were offered the opportunity to stay at their jobs without any guarantee that their jobs would continue to exist. Such employees were promised that they would "be treated with dignity and will be afforded the protections in place for such positions.” I would not find it motivating if my boss informed me that my job security was gone but that I would be treated with dignity. Why should I need assurances that I will be treated with dignity? Perhaps because one of the people giving me my termination notice goes by the Internet handle of “Bigballs”. Another stepped down from is position with DOGE after a Wall Street Journal reporter revealed his history of outlandish racist Tweets. But never fear! Vice President Vance, whose wife is Indian American, spoke  for the young man who posted the slogan “Normalize Indian hate," and Musk himself called for his return to DOGE, while also demanding that the Wall Street Journal reporter be fired. Yay free speech?

So how did things work out at Twitter? Well, if Mr. Musk was investing in Twitter in order to make it profitable, he clearly has not done well, although it is hard to get reliable information about a privately-held company. According to Kate Conger and Ryan Mac (see link above), Fidelity estimates that the company has lost 72% of its pre-acquisition valuation. Mr. Musk did cut staff by 80%, but some reports suggest he had to hire a lot of new people and the staff is now inching towards 40% of its pre-Musk total. That’s not indicative of failure, however. Mr. Musk’s strategy is to cut to the bone and then replace as needed. If he doesn’t have to increase staff, it just means he didn’t cut enough in the first place. But there is some evidence that the cuts harmed the company. Use of the site is stagnant, new ideas that were supposed to generate revenue do not seem to have panned out. The company’s forays into live streaming have been plagued with glitches.

Increasingly, it seems that Musk’s goal in acquiring Twitter was not to make it profitable, nor was it to champion unfettered freedom of expression. Rather, Mr. Musk may have wanted to control a social media platform to expand his ability to connect to the public and to help promote views to which he is sympathetic. It may be giving Mr. Musk too much credit to suggest that the Twitter acquisition was itself a dress rehearsal for DOGE, but clearly at some point it dawned on him that it could become a model.

So what can we learn from what happened at Twitter? Clare Duffy and Hadas Gold report on CNN that the road for former Twitter employees has been long and rocky. In the case of the Twitter refugees, many claim that Twitter has not made severance payments to which they are contractually entitled. In the case of department government employees, the problem may be that the Office of Personnel Management, which issued the Fork in the Road memo, doesn’t actually have authority to make deals with federal employees, nor does it have congressional authorization to pay out seven months of severance.

Twitter has been able to keep its dispute resolution with former employees under wraps, as most employees were bound to arbitrate their claims. That option will not be available to the federal government, and the law suits have already begun, as we noted in yesterday’s post. Those suits might lead to injunctions, preventing DOGE or OPM from enacting the lay-offs it proposes. In the meantime, there will be very public wrangling over the legality of the administration's actions. Some federal employees resigned after “clashing” with DOGE employees over access to public information. 

My prediction, for whatever that is worth, is that it will not be so easy for the administration to rid itself of federal workers. The protections are too well-established. That said, the cases will eventually find their way to the Supreme Court, which has been willing to hear high-profile political cases on an expedited basis. We will than find out how deeply the Court has imbibed the unitary executive theory cool-aid. I can imagine a world in which the Court rules unconstitutional all Congressional limitations on the President’s power to hire and fire employees of the executive branch. At that point, we will really find out what happens when DOGE gets to treat federal employees the way Mr. Musk treated Twitter employees. Perhaps it will be great, and our dollars will be as valuable as Bitcoin. Or perhaps we will come to regret the association of our government with Doge.